If I could travel in Time, I would……..”

Welcome to another post of the Friday Loose Bloggers’ Consortium when eleven of us post on the same topic chosen by one of us. Today’s topic has been chosen by Judy. Please do visit Ashok, Conrad, Grannymar, Magpie11, Maria, Gaelikaa, Helen, Judy, Anu and Ginger to see ten other views on the same topic. Some of these bloggers may be preoccupied with examinations, family problems and/or romance, so be a little indulgent in case they do not post or post late.

“Time is a sort of river of passing events, and strong is its current; no sooner is a thing brought to sight than it is swept by and another takes its place, and this too will be swept away.”
-Marcus Aurelius

Let me start off by some funny observations. If for some reason our sun stops working, it will take eight minutes for everything on the earth to begin the process of total annihilation. We however think that the sun we see now exists in real time. The brightest star that we see with our naked eyes is 8.6 light years away. In other words, the star that we see today may not even exist, as the light has had to travel 8.6 years to reach our eyes!

Time is the biggest joke that God has played on humans. Time is relative. When I am engrossed in writing my blogs, time flies. When I attend a prayer meeting, time crawls and the meeting does not seem to end at all.

So the existential question is, what time is that I am talking about when I wish that I could travel in time? If it is the past, it has disappeared. Nothing that existed a second ago is the same as it was two seconds ago. If it is the future, I do not know if I will be around to see it!

So, what is that time in which I wish that I could travel?

Let me start with the future. My desire to learn philosophy was kindled by the utter futility of what I was expected to do. Every quarter, without fail, I had to predict what would happen during the next four quarters and once a year, I had to predict what would happen five years hence. While most of it was statistics, with a lot of jargon, I had to explain to the moneybags in a language that they could understand by using ordinary English. I was among the more successful forecasters because, my forecasts came nearest to the predictions, but never, not even once did I succeed in meeting the prediction 100%. I know of no one else who has achieved this in business or politics or whatever walk of life. Philosophy taught me that there is nothing called future and there is only now. Once I learnt that simple fact of life, life became manageable and my predictions became a farce that I had to prepare to earn my livelihood. Not to be taken too seriously, but done nevertheless for practical reasons.

The past? Let me be practical. To locate some photographs for a recent post I had to go through a whole pile of them. There were some that brought a smile to my face, some that gave me heart ache and some that shamed me! What was common in all of them however was the realization that not one person in any of those photographs will, even remotely look like what the photos show, in the present. If one crossed my path now, it is doubtful that both of us would recognize each other. Even the places are unlikely to be the same and may not be recognizable.

Enough of practical pontification! If I could travel in time, I would certainly like to travel to the future, say thirty years hence and see what the world would look like. I have a sneaking suspicion, that it may not be the world, as we now know! It may well be a world ruled by a Kaliph from Afghanistan and the world’s populace may all be going around in ankle high loose trousers, turbans and burqas and hijabs. A world, whose economy will be financed by opium! Not something that I would like to see or be part of.

My hobby of bird waching will also have to be sacrificed. So, I would rather live in my present and make the most of the opportunities given to me by chance. Just so that we get a proper perceptive of just what it means to be alive on this planet earth, I request my readers to click on this link and enjoy the reality!